Welcome

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.

Thursday, 13 May 2010

Further leak analysis

I actually got through 5k hands today at FR Rush. I didn't make any money but I'm still happy with the way things are going. I'm closing in on a winning strategy and the fact that I broke even over those 5000 hands means I'm almost there. Now, I found a terrific article on the 2+2 forums and I was able to identify further leaks in my game. Basically it looks like I'm losing far too much money from the small blind and big blind. My statistics show that I'm losing 0.3 BB per hand from the big blind and 0.16 BB per hand from the small blind. I need to be targeting about half of those numbers, so 0.15 for the bb and 0.8 for sb. How do I intend to go about this? Well, studying other winning players from these limits, they are playing a very small number of hands from the blinds - less than me. The problem I have is that often if I see someone has min raised I think about calling to try and drill two pair or better since it's costing so little. What I think happens though is that I get the illusion of implied odds where there aren't any. I'll rarely get paid on one of those boards anyway, and will be stuck playing crappy hands out of position. So from now on I'm going to tighten up considerably and just play strong hands hard from those spots. Maybe use a strategy of {99+, AQ+} which I'll 3-bet every time or raise with limpers and fold everything else. I can complete in the SB with the low pocket pairs and maybe call a small raise from each position with them (pps) if a tight player has raised from early position. The other places at the table seem to be generating a nice profit for me so I'm not going to change much else. Expect all the work I do for the next few thousand hands to be bringing down the money I lose in the blinds. Once this has happened I anticipate that I'll begin to win money. If I can then verify that this is true I'll move to 25NL.